'You can if you want to. I don't think it'll solve your problem, though.'
'I beg your pardon.' His shears hung motionlessly over a rose.
'I think you committed a murder back in 1957, but in all probability you don't have the psychology of a killer. That means that you probably live with an awful guilt, Mr. Lemoyne. You go to bed with it and you wake with it. You drag it around all day long like a clanking chain.'
'Why is it that you seem to have this fixation about me? At first you accused me of being involved with a New Orleans gangster. Now this business about the murdered Negro.'
'I saw you do it.'
His egg-shaped face was absolutely still. Blood pooled in his cheeks like pink flowers.
'I was only nineteen,' I said. 'I watched y'all from across the bay. The black man tried to run, and one of you shot him in the leg, then continued shooting him in the water. You didn't even think me worthy of notice, did you? You were right, too. No one ever paid much attention to my story. That was a hard lesson for a nineteen-year- old.'
He closed the shears, locked the clasp on the handles, and set them down on a glass-topped patio table. He poured two inches of whiskey into a glass with no ice and squeezed a lemon into it. He seemed as solitary as a man might who had lived alone all his life.
'Would you care for one?' he said.
'No, thank you.'
'I have high blood pressure and shouldn't drink, but I put lemon in it and convince myself that I'm drinking something healthy along with the alcohol. It's my little joke with myself.' He took a deep breath.
'You want to tell me about it?'
'I don't think so. Am I under arrest?'
'Not right now. But I think that's the least of your problems.'
'You bewilder me, sir.'
'You're partners in a security service with Murphy Doucet. A fellow like that doesn't fit in the same shoe box with you.'
'He's an ex-police officer. He has the background that I don't.'
'He's a resentful and angry man. He's also anti-Semitic. One of your black employees told me you're good to people of color. Why would a man such as yourself go into business with a bigot?'
'He's uneducated. That doesn't mean he's a bad person.'
'I believe he's been blackmailing you, Mr. Lemoyne. I believe he was the other white man I saw across the bay with DeWitt Prejean.'
'You can believe whatever you wish.'
'We still haven't gotten to what's really troubling you, though, have we? It's those young women, isn't it?'
His eyes closed and opened, and then he looked away at the south where lightning was forking into the Gulf and the sky looked like it was covered with the yellow-black smoke from a chemical fire.
'I don't… I don't…' he began, then finished his whiskey and set his glass down. He wiped at the wet ring with the flat of his hand as though he wanted to scrub it out of the tabletop.
'That day you stopped me out under the trees at the lake,' I said, 'you wanted assurance that it was somebody else, somebody you don't know, who mutilated and killed those girls, didn't you? You didn't want that sin on your conscience as well as Prejean's murder.'
'My God, man, give some thought to what you're saying. You're telling me I'm responsible for a fiend being loose in our midst.'
'Call your attorney and come into the office and make a statement. End it now, Mr. Lemoyne. You'll probably get off with minimum time on Prejean's death. You've got a good reputation and a lot of friends. You might even walk.'
'Please leave.'
'It won't change anything.'
He turned away from me and gazed at the approaching storm. Leaves exploded out of the trees that towered above his garden walls.
'Go do what you have to do, but right now please respect my privacy,' he said.
'You strayed out of the gentleman's world a long time ago.'
'Don't you have any sense of mercy?'
'Maybe you should come down to my office and look at the morgue photographs of Cherry LeBlanc and a girl we pried out of an oil barrel down in Vermilion Parish.'
He didn't answer. As I let myself out his garden gate I glanced back at him. His cheeks were red and streaked with moisture as though his face had been glazed by freezing winds.
That evening the weatherman said the hurricane had become stationary one hundred miles due south of Mobile. As I fell asleep later with the window open on a lightning-charged sky, I thought surely the electricity would bring the general back in my dreams.
Instead, it was Lou Girard who stood under the wind-tormented pecan trees at three in the morning, his jaw shot away at the hinge, a sliver of white bone protruding from a flap of skin by his ear.
He tried to speak, and spittle gurgled on his exposed teeth and tongue and dripped off the point of his chin.
'What is it, Lou?'
The wind whipped and molded his shapeless brown suit against his body. He picked up a long stick that had been blown out of the tree above him and began scratching lines in the layers of dead leaves and pecan husks at his feet. He made an S, and then drew a straight line like an I and then put a half bubble on it and turned it into a P.
He dropped the stick to the ground and stared at me, his deformed face filled with expectation.
Chapter 18
The connection had been there all along. I just hadn't looked in the right place. As soon as I went into the office at 8 a.m. the next morning I called the probation and parole officer in Lafayette and asked the supervising P.O. to pull the file on Cherry LeBlanc.
'Who busted her on the prostitution charge?' I said.
I heard him leafing back and forth through the pages in the file.
'It wasn't one officer. There was a state-police raid on a bar and some trailers out on the Breaux Bridge highway.'
S.P. Yes, the state police. Thanks, Lou, old friend.
'Who signed the arrest report?' I asked.
'Let's see. It's pretty hard to read. Somebody set a coffee cup down on the signature.'
'It's real important, partner.'
'It could be Doucet. Wasn't there a state policeman around here by that name? Yeah, I'd say initial M., then Doucet.'
'Can you make copies of her file and lock them in separate places?'
'What's going on?'
'It may become evidence.'
'No, I mean Lou Girard was looking at her file last week. What's the deal?'
'Do this for me, will you? If anybody else tries to get his hands on that file, you call me, okay?'
'There's an implication here that I think you should clarify.'
Outside, the skies were gray, and dust and pieces of paper were blowing in the street.
'Maybe we have a fireman setting fires,' I said.
He was quiet a moment, then he said, 'I'll lock up the file for you, detective, and I'll keep your call confidential. But since this may involve a reflection on our office, I expect a little more in the way of detailed information from
